The Beast: A Conversation with Óscar Martínez

The Duke Forum for Scholars and Publics and Frank Stasio from WUNC’s The State of Things invite you to participate in a discussion on Central American migration to North Carolina.

This event is free and open to the public, with no registration required.

Every year, tens of thousands of Central Americans — from Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador — make a perilous overland journey to the United States. They travel north through Mexico to the US border, riding on top of cargo trains known as “La Bestia” or “the Beast.”

Óscar Martínez, a young award-winning investigative journalist for ElFaro.net, the first exclusively digital newspaper in Latin America, spent two years following in the footsteps of more than 250,000 migrants who make the perilous journey across Mexico every year. He has ridden the Beast eight times himself, interviewing people on their way to the United States. In 2010, his reporting resulted in a book, Los migrantes que no importan, which has just been published in English to The Beast.